Background

A little over a year and a half ago, we challenged ourselves to find a fresh way to interact with WordPress, and now we're ready to unveil what we've been working on. The new WordPress.com interface is built from the ground up as a single JavaScript application that relies on the WordPress.com REST API to communicate to the WordPress core.

This is just one possible implementation that works for any WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled site — our goal is to showcase different ways of thinking about how to interact with WordPress and get more and more people excited about it.

Guiding Principles

While building out the new WordPress.com, we used a few key ideas to guide us along the way.

Multi-site support

From the start, we wanted to build a single place to manage all of your WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled sites, so you can focus on content — not administration.

Speed

Utilizing JavaScript and the WordPress.com REST API, the new WordPress.com is made with speed in mind. Page loads are near-instant, and the experience is snappy.

Real time

Make a change to one of your WordPress sites, and see it reflected in real time, no page refreshes needed.

Responsive

Create new sites on WordPress.com and manage your existing sites whenever you want to, on any device, wherever you are.

Open development

Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation. I’m proud to take our intellectual property crown jewels and open Calypso up to the world for the community to hack on, play with, poke, prod, and extend and make their own. This is the same spirit of sharing which has allowed WordPress to become a de facto web operating system over the past decade. It may take time, but open will win over closed every time.

- Matt Mullenweg

Project Stack

The new WordPress.com codebase, codenamed "Calypso," moves WordPress.com away from MySQL and PHP. It's built entirely in JavaScript, and communicates with WordPress.com only using our REST API. This means the new WordPress.com is a browser-based client for our API, just like any other application built on top of it — lighter, faster, and more flexible for a mobile-focused world.

Calypso uses a thin layer of Node.js on the server to build the initial web page, and much of the logic is run in the client as a Single Page Application (SPA) built in-house, leveraging many other open source JavaScript modules. Calypso adopted Facebook's React view library early on, and has been heavily influenced by other open source work in the React community.

Have a look

We're really proud of what we've built here, and we hope you'll love it too. Please try out the new WordPress.com and let us know what you think.

Common questions

Is this a new WordPress?

This is a new interface for WordPress, in use now at WordPress.com and in the desktop app. It's a modern take on how to write and manage content, that retains the same open source WordPress at its central core, powering everything through our REST API.

Why open-source?

Open source software benefits from the feedback, contributions, and security efforts of millions of people. You don't have to trust us: view the code yourself and contribute to it, which we’d love, or fork it and make it something all your own.

How can I use this?

If you’re an existing WordPress.com user, you already are! Elements of the new WordPress.com have been progressively launched over the past eighteen months. If you run your own self-hosted WordPress site, you can install the Jetpack plugin to use the Calypso-based editing and management tools. Your site will be ready to go once you log in to WordPress.com or download the Mac desktop app.

How can I contribute?

Since the codebase is completely open source, you can check out the GitHub repository. If you see something you’d like to fix or have something new you’d like to contribute, just open a new a new pull request with your changes.

Will this be replacing WP-Admin?

Now, WordPress users have that option. We’re laying an entirely new foundation for a generation of apps and services built on WordPress — but whether the Calypso codebase eventually becomes part of core WordPress and replaces WP-Admin is up to the WordPress community.

Will you be using the WordPress core REST API in the future?

We're excited about the REST scaffolding going in WordPress 4.4, but the endpoints in the latest version don't cover a huge part of what we're doing. Automattic contributors to core have been heavily involved in the core API work so far, and we expect that to continue and increase in 2016, hopefully completely harmonizing the different APIs in one of the core releases next year.

Why a single-page application?

We believe that single-page applications provide the fastest and most app-like experience for users. We want to provide the same experience whether you’re using the WordPress.com website, the desktop app, or a mobile app, and a SPA written using front end technologies is the way to achieve that.

Are you hiring?

We are always hiring! We’d love to talk with you, please check out our work with us page where you’ll find more specific positions available.